Professional and non-professionals alike engage in the activity of playing cards. Leagues, associations and clubs promote whatever specific game is the focal point of their activity and the numbers of people who routinely engage in competition in the playing of cards numbers in the millions.
Bridge is one such card game and is considered to be the most popular card game in the world with bridge clubs nationwide and in many foreign countries. The popularity of the game is immense and involves a friendly competition between two sets of players.
Four people play bridge. The person sitting opposite a given player is that person's partner and the nature of the game requires that four persons play at one time and the seating thereof is in partnerships of two with partners facing each other across the table. This invention relates to games of cards and especially to the game of bridge and is an apparatus for the substitution of the usual plastic cards with spherical elements and a means for randomizing the spherical elements and subsequently dealing the spherical elements out to each of the four players.
The apparatus further relates to a table structure that houses or contains the randomizing means and provides retaining means on the surface thereof for the display of the spherical elements and the organization of same within the format and rules of the game and also to the dispersal of the spherical elements to a player tray area in which only the player can see the specific elements that have been dealt; a planar surface of the table structure overlaying the player tray area prevents all other players from viewing the `hand` of any of the other three players.